Ad Context Protocol (AdCP) is moving the software development of its sales agent for publishers to Prebid, according to AdExchanger yesterday.
Although this isn’t a change of governance — which remains with AgenticAdvertising[dot]org — for the nascent agentic protocol, it appears to be an effort to supercharge development and adoption on the sell-side among Prebid’s members.
AdExchanger’s Anthony Vargas explained:
“The new offering, dubbed the Prebid Sales Agent, will be available to all publishers within 30 to 45 days, according to Prebid. Publishers will be able to download the software from GitHub and offer their feedback on its development regardless of whether they’re Prebid members.”
Prebid chairman and Magnite SVP of product, Garrett McGrath, said in a release: “By stewarding the AdCP sales agent repository, now the Prebid Sales Agent, we’re investing in an open source foundation that helps publishers scale direct outcomes without being pushed into proprietary systems or vendor lock-in.”
Read:
- Prebid Takes Over AdCP’s Code For Creating Sell-Side AI Agents (January 29) – AdExchanger
- Prebid Announces Prebid Sales Agent in Collaboration with AgenticAdvertising[dot]org (January 29) – press release
- Prebid sales agent – Github
Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley’s explainer
On his personal blog, founding AdCP consortium member, Scope3 CEO Brian O’Kelley, went deeper on explaining the AdCP use case as well as the technical state-of-play for the sales agent.
Regarding why the protocol is needed, Mr. O’Kelley argued:
“This is the shift from day trading to portfolio management. Programmatic is bid-by-bid, impression-by-impression optimization – exhausting for humans and algorithms alike, leaving value on the table. Agentic buying is strategic: an agent allocates budget across a portfolio of publisher relationships, optimizes over weeks not milliseconds, and finds value that no human (or DSP) would have the bandwidth to discover.
For publishers, this means premium revenue can scale without scaling headcount.”
Read: “The Open Agentic Web: Powered by Prebid” (January 29) – BOK on Ads (and Climate)
Prebid already has an “Agentic Project Management Committee” ready to go with at least one member of the AdCP founding consortium — Optable — in the role of chair:
“Agentic Project Management Committee
Description: Provide guidance and tools, including foundational technology products, that support publishers monetizing through agentic pipelines.
Chair: John Rosendahl (Optable)
Vice Chair: Olga Paramonova (Sigma Software)
Meeting: Every Wednesday at 11 am EST”
From tipsheet: “How do we go faster?”
The AdCP consortium’s answer appears to be, “Give the sell-side software to Prebid to speed things along.” The demand-side needs something to buy after all.
Prebid is an organization whose origins reside in the early days of header bidding and Prebid[dot]js, which was created by engineers at Mr. O’Kelley’s AppNexus a decade ago.
Finally, this Prebid announcement coming the day after the IAB agentic roadmap webinar was not coincidence. Game is “on” when it comes to establishing agentic standards.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- “Perplexity signs a deal with Microsoft; sources say the $750M, three-year commitment will let Perplexity deploy AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry service” (January 29) – Bloomberg (subscription)
- OpenAI Plans Fourth-Quarter IPO in Race to Beat Anthropic to Market (January 29) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
- Top engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code – (January 29) – Fortune
TECH
IAB Tech Lab’s agentic roadmap revealed
The IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising technical standards arm of (but separate from) the IAB, produced a webinar on Wednesday titled, “Launching the Agentic Roadmap”.
And if there was only one observation coming out of the webinar, it would be that the “AI wave” is inspiring massive change across TechLab’s remit.
In previewing the agenda of the hour-long presentation, Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur stressed the need for building standards on top of standards and “wrapping it” in Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A).
Katsur identified six of Tech Lab’s standards for “agentifying” in 2026:
- OpenDirect → Agentic Direct
- RTB → Agentic Bid
- Deals API → Agentic Deals
- AdCom → Agentic Ad Objects
- Ad Management API → Agentic Creative
- ARTF → ARTF V2
Other highlights:
- IAB Tech Lab will be investing in the development of use cases showing the value of agentic workflows.
- The debut of a “creative readiness” agent that could be useful for CTV creative
- Buyer and seller agents in the works.
- Agentic mobile (MobileCP) – being driven by CloudX
- Agentic audiences and User Context Protocol (UCP) – being driven by LiveRamp
- March 1: Launch of Agent to Agent registry
View: “Webinar Replay: Launching the Agentic Roadmap” (January 28) – IAB Tech Lab
More:
- “Agentic Advertising and AI” – IAB Tech Lab
- IAB Tech Lab repository for agentic standards – GitHub
From tipsheet: Lots going on in this webinar — if you love demos and standards development, this is for you.
It’s clearly a big year for the ad tech industry and Tech Lab. The robust roadmap once again spoke to the urgency Mr. Katsur expressed regarding AI and advertising last June.
PLATFORMS
Gokul Rajaram: How to succeed in ads
On the latest episode of “Invest Like The Best” podcast with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, former Meta and Google ad product executive and current investor, Gokul Rajaram, is the guest.
Among other topics – and in the context of OpenAI’s foray into ads – Mr. Rajaram discussed how to succeed in ads:
[48:00]
“There are three fundamental ways to succeed in the ads business. Three, and only three.
1) You need to own a very coveted group of users and a surface on which those users interact. Google Search is a great example. It’s a surface a very coveted set of users interact with. Obviously, they express high intent… so Google is one of the most profitable ad businesses. Facebook – very similar. It took us a while to figure out what was coveted about these users. Turns out what was coveted was the identity. We knew who these users were, and we could match them to customer and other data and so you could precisely target these people with messages you wanted, and you could find people similar to that. ChatGPT – the combination of intent and identity data is unparalleled. Google had intent data, but not identity. Facebook identity, but not intent.
These things have been brought together [with OpenAI’s ChatGPT]. It’s the dream of any advertising person… and these are complex multi-phase searches. That’s the other beautiful thing – you search, and then you search again, and you’re just building up searches [with ChatGPT]. At Google, you typically search and then you lose the person because they go off and click and you don’t hear. These are natural language queries for amazing targeting. So that’s one way of making money where you have to own a first party product. You have to be the first party.
2) You have to drive outcomes. That’s another way of making money where you don’t own any inventory, but you can drive outcomes to advertisers. The best example of this is a company called AppLovin, a 100+ billion dollar company. They drive one outcome really well: mobile app installs. No one believed that people would need that many mobile app installs.It turns out everyone wants to get mobile app installs. It was initially only restricted to gaming, but now every mobile app where they sold want mobile app installs.
So AppLovin has built a massive infrastructure. Now they control the buy side, they control the sell side, they even control the middleware.So you could argue that they control the auction for most mobile apps in a way that almost Google used to control or people say they control for the web. But AppLovin has built an amazing engine to deliver mobile app installs at a certain cost.So that’s the other way, second way to do it. You deliver an outcome at a certain cost.
3) You are the exclusive provider for a large advertiser or a large source of demand. A good example is a company called The Trade Desk, where Procter and Gamble, for example, go to a Trade Desk and say, ‘I spend with Google, I spend with Facebook, all my other display budget, Trade Desk, here you go. You can figure out how to distribute it and how to run it.’
And so those are the three ways, but you’ve got to be exclusive. Those are the three ways that you can make money.”
Listen: “Gokul Rajaram: Lessons from Investing in 700 Companies” (January 29) – “Invest Like The Best” on Apple Podcasts app
From tipsheet: Mr. Rajaram is a board member of The Trade Desk.
MARKETING
Refining AI data for marketing
Datalinx AI, an “AI data refinery that turns complex data into AI and application-ready assets” for enterprise marketing, announced a $4.2 million seed round of financing. Investors include High Alpha, Aperiam and Databricks — Datalinx AI participated in Databricks’ AI Accelerator in 2025.
Read the press release. (January 29)
Co-founder and CEO Joe Luchs’ background spans ad tech history with stops at 33Across, BlueKai/Oracle, Beeswax (Ari Parparo is a Datalinx AI investor) and Amazon’s AWS and Ads.
In October, Luchs told AdExchanger that “Datalinx developed a team of specialized AI agents to complete tasks ranging from scanning a cloud database and processing datasets to identity resolution. Each agent is powered by a series of LLMs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Meta.” Read that one. (October 2025)
From tipsheet: The startup’s LinkedIn page offers a description of the company on even simpler terms: “Think of it like Uber for data: enter your business goal, and our agentic system maps and prepares your data from origin to destination.”
Everything is automating.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Will the Gemini chatbot ever have ads?
(lightly edited)
“[Google is] already monetizing Gemini with ads – they’re doing it with AI Overviews and AI Mode. They’re monetizing AI Overviews at parity with Search.
Why would they rush to put ads in Gemini the chatbot?
Keep in mind, Gemini is two things: 1) Gemini is the family of models and 2) Gemini is the chatbot.
Why monetize with ads in Gemini the chatbot? You never need to. You could just drive adoption of Gemini.
They’re already monetizing Gemini — the family of models – through AI Overviews and AI Mode. AI Overviews reaches 2 billion people a month. That’s the biggest single LLM output ad surface that exists. They’re already monetizing Gemini through there.” – Eric Seufert
See the clip of Mobile Dev Memo analyst Eric Seufert on TBPN (January 29) via X.
Listen to Mr. Seufert’s entire interview yesterday on TBPN on Apple Podcasts app. (35 minutes)
Related: On Meta’s earnings (January 29) – Eric Seufert on Mobile Dev Memo (subscription)
PEOPLE MOVES
Now hiring
“I’m thrilled to share that I’ve stepped into the role of Head of Global Advertising at xAI, leading our exceptional sales, content partnerships, and marketing teams for the X platform. What a pleasure it has been building with these teams the last two and a half years. I am incredibly excited for what’s possible as we harness the combined power of xAI and X in service of our community and partners…” – Monique Pintarelli on LinkedIn
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Former Viant and Teads executive Monique Pintarelli is Head of Global Advertising at xAI (January 29) – LinkedIn
MORE
- “Meta’s AI Ad Silence is a Strategic Risk” (January 29) – Debra Aho Williamson, analyst, Sonata Insights on LinkedIn
- Agentic AI… What’s an Agent, Anyway? (January 29) – Andrew Kraft on his Substack
- Apple sales surge 16% on ‘staggering’ iPhone demand (January 29) – CNBC
- Benchmarking The Chatbot Ad Market: How About $3.5B This Year? (January 29) – MediaPost